The Virginian

Rasmussen: 

Mitt Romney has now jumped to his biggest lead ever over President Obama in a hypothetical Election 2012 matchup. It’s also the biggest lead a named Republican candidate has held over the incumbent in Rasmussen Reports surveying to date.


The latest national telephone survey finds that 45% of Likely U.S. Voters favor the former Massachusetts governor, while 39% prefer the president. Ten percent (10%) like some other candidate in the race, and six percent (6%) are undecided.

Labels: election, Obama, Polls, Romney

Conventional wisdom has the Ron Paul boomlet in Iowa spelling trouble for Republicans. I suggest that it’s actually more trouble for Obama. Daniel Henninger in the Wall Street Journal seems to have a glimpse of the reasons behind this, but swerves back to looking at it only from the perspective of the Republican field. Here is part of his article:

The first [problem] is a cranky congressman from Texas named Ron Paul who won't disown a third-party spoiler candidacy. The second problem is the Ron Paul vote, which as we'll see has little to do with Ron Paul.

Exactly.

The Ron Paul vote is a separate matter. In June, polling put the familiar Mr. Paul at about 5.5% for the Iowa caucus and 8% nationally. That would be his normal ceiling. Suddenly, Ron Paul is the Iowa front-runner at over 22.5% and is up to 12% nationally. Why?


Is this surge a vote for the congressman named Ron Paul? Impossible. It's in fact the Republican Party protest vote. Since summer, this block of votes has jumped from one candidate to another, desperate for an anti-Obama champion whose anti-Washington intensity matches its own….


The Paul candidacy is of course doomed. But the Paul vote won't die. This vote has been building in the depths of the American political ocean since the spending spree of the second Bush term. These people see the upward spending trend in annual outlays and accumulated commitments not as a "problem," as the Beltway prefers, but as a threat to their well-being.

Here’s the point that I believe Henninger misses. “These people” who are fuelling the Paul boomlet, and before that the Bachman/Perry/Cain/Gingrich boomlets, are not just the Republican protest vote. Since Obama has no Democrat rivals, there’s no real opportunity for a Democrat protest vote. The only way for Republicans and the unaffiliated middle-of-the-roader who voted for Obama in 2008 to show their opposition to Washington policies is the Republican primary. And who are they? They are the broad middle class who are unemployed or have family members, neighbors and friends who are losing their homes, their jobs and their hope for a better future while Washington lives it up on their dime.

They read stories on the Internet - stories their newspapers won’t print - about billions lost on “green energy” boondoggles while they pay $40 to $50 dollars for a tank of gas. They are losing their houses to foreclosure after Obama promised to fix that problem. They see trillion dollar deficits while their living standards erode and are demanding to know where the money’s going.

They are that virtual mob with pitchforks that are desperate to anoint someone as their leader who will help them storm the castle and evict the ogre holed up there. Mitt Romney doesn’t look like the kind of guy who is comfortable handling a pitchfork, but if he’s the last man standing after all the others fail, he’ll be appointed to that role.

In 2008 the people went to the polls before the full impact of the financial melt-down had sunk in. They voted for Mr. HopeN’Change because they thought Obama didn’t really mean it when he promised to fundamentally change America. They though that they were electing a President who would fix the problems and set the country back on its accustomed course. The Three Years of Obama taught them just how wrong they were. HopeN'Change is now replaced by Change it Back.  Obama is now viewed with fear and loathing. Those who did not like him now despise him and those who were on the fence are joining the opposition. Many see Obama as the ogre in the castle who has taken America hostage. The middle class is in danger of losing its grip on their part of the American Dream, and this time the mob with pitchforks is for real.  That is the real meaning of the Paul vote.

UPDATE:  Thanks Glenn, Ace, and others.

Labels: election, Obama, Ron Paul

Bob Shieffer once thought that Barack Obama would add $200 billion to the deficit ... over his term in office.  It would really be interesting to see how he excuses Obama for making $200 billion a rounding error.  Is there anyone who thinks that he would not?

Barack Obama :  "I will go though the Federal budget line by line, page by page."

How's that working out for you?




H/T Instapundit

Labels: debt, Liberalism, media, Obama, The Press

H/T Instapundit

Labels: Bush, debt, Obama, Patriotism

H/T Instapundit

Labels: Biden, corruption, crime, Democrats

A link to all the criminals who occupy the mayors offices and joined Bloomberg when he formed Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

Gun Owners Against Illegal Mayors represents Americans united to fight the Bloomberg Gang, a band of organized criminal politicians. Originating in New York City, the Gang has recruited criminal mayors across the United States.

Some of the Gang's members have been convicted of assaulting officers and constituents, corruption, extortion, theft, obstruction of justice, bribery, perjury, tax evasion, child porn, battery, and child molestation. They have attacked constituents and police officers, destroyed houses with sledge hammers, and even stolen gift cards donated for the poor. No crime is beneath them and no enormity beyond them.

Warning, if you see these mayors, don't try to apprehend them yourself, call the police and flee the area.

Labels: crime, Guns

Labels: Liberalism, taxes

I don't think EBL likes Althouse.

Labels: Althouse, blogging

Labels: crime

Labels: Economy, media, Politics, Republicans, social security, taxes, The Press

Frankly, Western Marxism has entered into an alliance with Islamism everywhere. Under the banner of multiculturalism, under the cover of “hate speech”, under the constant apologia of political correctness, it hopes to use Islam as a battering ram to destroy the last remnants of its domestic opposition. They are in a “united front” with Islam to destroy the Near Enemy.

In this calculus, the Far Friends — if friends they be — count for little. Middle Eastern and African Christians are collateral damage. Not just Christians, one might add, but animists and Buddhists and Hindus, and Jains — you name it — as well.

It makes a good deal of tactical sense from the Marxist viewpoint to regard the “enemy of the enemy is my friend”. But there is no advantage whatsoever among those in the crosshairs of Marxism not to recognize this. The “I am caring” routine just suppresses the gag reaction to the poisoned Kool-Aid. Through this process of speaking on your behalf the caring and concerned they smoothed the way for a Victory Mosque at Manhattan’s Ground Zero; turned an Islamist attack on soldiers at Fort Hood into a “workplace” incident; how they have made it a hate speech crime everywhere to offend certain cultural sensitivities. They did it in the name of being friend to “Christian” and the advocate of caring beliefs.

And while people may have no choice about getting it rammed down their throats by main force they owe it to themselves to recognize it for the scam that it is. Just the latest version of Jim Jones’ magic potion.

Labels: Christianity, Communism, crime, Islamofascism, Liberalism, violence

The world is about to be changed.

"No one is suspecting anything. It would not be easy for the world to be making less reference to God than it was making then. No one was on the look-out for a divine interference, unless it were that here and there some truth-stammering oracle perturbed a narrow circle, whose superstition was the thing likest religion of all things in the heathen world. In the palace of the Csesars, who suspected that unborn Caesar in His Cave?"

Labels: Christianity

Right after the first shots the van door was thrust open and two men with white surgical coats thrown over their uniforms carried a body in, the head and feet still twitching slightly. The young doctor noted that the wound was on the right side of the chest as he had expected. When body #3 was laid down, he went to work.

Male, 40-ish, Han Chinese. While the other retail organs in the van were slated for the profitable foreigner market, the doctor had seen the paperwork indicating this kidney was tissue-matched for transplant into a 50-year-old Chinese man. Without the transplant, that man would die. With it, the same man would rise miraculously from his hospital bed and go on to have a normal life for 25 years or so. By 2016, given all the anti-tissue-rejection drug advances in China, they could theoretically replace the liver, lungs, or heart—maybe buy that man another 10 to 15 years.

Body #3 had no special characteristics save an angry purple line on the neck. The doctor recognized the forensics. Sometimes the police would twist a wire around a prisoner’s throat to prevent him from speaking up in court. The doctor thought it through methodically. Maybe the police didn’t want this prisoner to talk because he had been a deranged killer, a thug, or mentally unstable. After all, the Chinese penal system was a daily sausage grinder, executing hardcore criminals on a massive scale. Yes, the young doctor knew the harvesting was wrong. Whatever crime had been committed, it would be nice if the prisoner’s body were allowed to rest forever. Yet was his surgical task that different from an obstetrician’s? Harvesting was rebirth, harvesting was life, as revolutionary an advance as antibiotics or steroids. Or maybe, he thought, they didn’t want this man to talk because he was a political prisoner.

Labels: China, Communism, media, Medical

Bill Whittle

Labels: Obama

Argentina's senate, which is controlled by Fernandez's allies, voted 41-26 to control newsprint's manufacture, sale and distribution to media friends and foes alike.

It brings to mind this quotation by Vaclav Havel:

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Labels: Communism, Fascism, South America, The Press

Via Daily Caller

Labels: Obama

The post-totalitarian system touches people at every step, but it does so with its ideological gloves on. This is why life in the system is so thoroughly permeated with hypocrisy and lies: government by bureaucracy is called popular government; the working class is enslaved in the name of the working class; the complete degradation of the individual is presented as his ultimate liberation; depriving people of information is called making it available; the use of power to manipulate is called the public control of power, and the arbitrary abuse of power is called observing the legal code; the repression of culture is called its development; the expansion of imperial influence is presented as support for the oppressed; the lack of free expression becomes the highest form of freedom; farcical elections become the highest form of democracy; banning independent thought becomes the most scientific of world views; military occupation becomes fraternal assistance. Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing.

Labels: biased reporting, crony capitalism, Environment, media, The Press, Virginian Pilot

Admitted perjurer viewed as hero.

Holder must go.

Labels: crime, Holder, Liberalism, Race

Labels: Politics, social security

Richard Fernandez

The men of the hour synchronize their exquisitely accurate watches without having learned to tell the time. They scrutinize the compass, while declaring that East and West are all the same to them.

Is it 3:00 a.m. yet? And if the phone rings what should be said? Since Noam Chomsky once likened Havel’s aspirations to an “embarrassingly silly and morally repugnant Sunday School sermon,” one would guess the answer is “anything.” To open the door but never to step through it; to notice the modern Berlin Wall but never to challenge it; to observe the fact of the slavery and never once mention it since that would be judgmental — that is the hallmark of today’s post-Sunday School Man.

Labels: atheism, Belmont, Christianity, Courage, Liberalism, Obama

It's good to be the king.  Shared Sacrifice?

Labels: Economy, Obama

The truth is never an obstacle to Matt Yglesias when a lying smear will do.

A smear that prospered far too long

Labels: Liberalism, media, The Press

Christopher Hitchens is dead, and the one fact that is included in every obituary is the fact that he was an apostle of atheism. It was a good way for a writer to make money. There is a big market for it.
Gerard VanderLeun:

This is not to say that Hitchens' heavily touted atheism didn't work well for him. It did. Although I don't know the numbers I suspect that -- between the sales of his books and his speaking jobs preaching the "God Is Not Great" gospel -- Hitchens probably made the most money of his life on the "Lets Get Together and Insult God" circuit. Public proclamations and revival tent meetings of atheists have been oddly popular in the last decade. Hitchens surfed that wave well doing his part in stripping the rubes of their spare cash like some latter day Elmer Gantry of the Fundamentalist Atheians.

The atheists who proclaim their faith in nothing are continually impressed with their own intelligence. And Hitchins cashed in on it.

There's always a fresh crop of American rubes impressed with their own "intellect" ready to hear that their "tough minded" denial of God has a lot of ed-u-crated intellect-u-wells just like them nodding in agreement like the drinking bird over the glass. And in his own tough minded, hard drinking way Hitchens was just the sort of messiah "intellectual" American atheists love. He had, first and last, an upper-class British accent. In America such an accent is gold. Here the orotund Oxfordian tones always make whatever anyone is saying sound somehow more authoritative to the "intellectual" American ear. The result of of that accent piled on top of all the tough talking and tough thinking and hard drinking was, for Hitchens, the sweet clink of coin.
I'll admit that I don't understand the compulsion of atheists to shout out their faith like the worst of the holy rollers; to dragoon whoever pauses to listen to them into a corner and beat them about the brain pan with the "obvious truth" of their oddly Godless religion. Perhaps they feel scant of saints and seek to sanctify skepticism for solace.


I suppose that when you believe in Nothing it's hard to stand pat at zero sans signs and symbols. Instead you've got to slap the icon of your proud puffed self up on your smoke-spun altar of Oblivion where the dark stars dissolve.

I have faith that today Hitchens knows his error. If he was right, he’s still dead.

Labels: atheism, Religion

Following a multi vehicle crash in Missouri, the nannies at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) want to outlaw using cell phones while driving.

As Frank J. Fleming observes, it's a good thing that cars were not invented today. If they were, the government would never allow them to be built, or allow us to drive them. Too dangerous, too polluting, too much freedom.

But back to the crash that the NTSB doesn't want to go to waste. Glenn Reynolds explains that while the Board places the blame on cell phones, the reality is much different. Let’s start with the impetus for NTSB’s pronouncement: a multi vehicle crash that happened in Missouri in 2010.

A 19-year-old pickup driver rear-ended a truck, and then was rear-ended by two school buses. Two people, including the pickup driver, were killed, and 38 were injured. Although there’s no evidence as to whether the pickup driver was texting at the moment of the crash, he had sent or received 11 texts in the previous 11 minutes.

Texting while driving is dangerous and in my state of Virginia, it's already illegal. But the NTSB wants to go much further including outlawing hands-free phoning.

First, the Missouri crash was largely caused by more mundane safety issues that the NTSB seems to have deliberately downplayed. For all the discussion of the dangers of texting and driving, the NTSB report contains this rather significant finding: “Had the driver of the following school bus maintained the recommended minimum distance from the lead school bus, she would have been able to avoid the accident."

That’s right: Don’t follow too closely, just like they teach you in driver’s ed. And why did the first school bus rear-end the pickup? According to the NTSB, that was “the result of the bus driver’s inattention to the forward roadway, due to excessive focus on a motorcoach parked on the shoulder of the road."

We suspect an agenda that has nothing to do with any particular accident, but the desire to never let a crisis go to waste. There is an hostility to cell phone use despite the lack of persuasive evidence that they have contributed to any meaningful increase in accidents.

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air has a list of things that should be banned before cell phones:

While they’re at it, the NTSB might want to take a look at banning some other distractions to driving, too:
•Screaming children
•Back-seat drivers
•Car radios
•High-beam headlights
•Pedestrians
•Subwoofers
•(Actually, I’ll put subwoofers twice, since I hate those things)
•Make-up
•Food
•Newspapers
•Necking … and worse

He also references a report that shows the a cell phone ban in California has not impacted car safety at all.

The NHTSA report on accidents "involving" cell phones as the cause of fatal accidents is instructive.  In the highlights, the report states that ...

Sixteen percent of fatal crashes in 2009 involved reports of distracted driving and ... of those people killed in distracted-driving-related crashes, 995 involved reports of a cell phone as a distraction (18% of fatalities in distraction-related crashes)..

For the mathematically impaired, let me explain: 18% of 16% is 2.9%. So the NTSB wants to ban cell phones in cars to affect less than three percent of traffic related deaths.

Do we see a trend here?  It has been said that we can't go a day without breaking the law.   This one is for those who haven't broken any of the millions of others yet.  The ruling class can always put your in jail for something.   You're only exempt if you are a member of the ruling class.

Labels: government control, Law

New Mexico has an unpaid legislature, except for those that are above the law.  And they are free to make racist comments. Because Sheryl Williams Stapleton is who she is ...
 ... a Democrat.

Labels: corruption, crime, Democrats, Race

Frank J. points out that if cars were invented today, the government would not allow them on the road ... or us to drive them.

Imagine if cars hadn’t been around for a century, but instead were just invented today. Is there any way they’d be approved for individual use? It’s an era of bans on incandescent bulbs; if you suggested putting millions of internal-combustion engines out there, you’d get looks like you were Hitler proposing the Final Solution.

Labels: government control

... calls Gingrich the Devil.

Well, Matthews was never hinged to begin with so this is more like some pervert in a trench coat opening it up.  Same guy, different view.

H/T Liberty at stake

Labels: biased reporting, Liberalism, media, The Press

Worth a read. 

“Rather than produce smart people, the university system has dumbed America down. After two generations of academic wheel-spinning, the transformation of universities into Maoist re-education camps with beer kegs has ruined their practical value.”

The conclusion ...

Liberalism, like cancer, is a self-liquidating malady. Eventually it kills the patient. Secular Americans, mainline Protestants, loosely-affiliated Catholics, and Reform and Conservative Jews breed like Germans or Italians, with fewer than 1.5 children per female. By contrast, Hispanic Catholics have 3 children, and evangelicals 2.6 children. America is like Schroedinger’s Cat, in a superposed state of being dead and live. And long before demographics catch up with liberal culture and extinguish it, like the post-Alexandrine Greeks or the 5th-century Romans, the economic destruction wrought by liberal education will have impoverished most of a generation of American young people.

Labels: Academia, Liberalism, TimesLies

Labels: Conservative, Liberalism, Race

In St. Louis.

I wish we had one here in Southeast Virginia.

Labels: Tea Party

Things that came to me on the Internet.

Good morning, brothers and sisters; it's always a delight to see the pews crowded on Sunday morning, and so eager to get into God's Word. Turn with me in your Bibles, if you will, to the 47th chapter of Genesis. We'll begin our reading at verse 13, and go through verse 27.

Brother Ray, would you stand and read that great passage for us? ... (reading) .. Thank you for that fine reading, Brother Ray. So we see that economic hard times fell upon Egypt , and the people turned to the government of Pharaoh to deal with this for them. And Pharaoh nationalized the grain harvest, and placed the grain in great storehouses that he had built. So the people brought their money to Pharaoh, like a great tax increase, and gave it all to him willingly in return for grain. And this went on until their money ran out, and they were hungry again.

So when they went to Pharaoh after that, they brought their livestock - their cattle, their horses, their sheep, and their donkey - to barter for grain, and verse 17 says that only took them through the end of that year. But the famine wasn't over, was it? So the next year, the people came before Pharaoh and admitted they had nothing left, except their land and their own lives. "There is nothing left in the sight of my lord but our bodies and our land. Why should we die before your eyes, both we and our land? Buy us and our land for food, and we with our land will be servants to Pharaoh." So they surrendered their homes, their land, and their real estate to Pharaoh's government, and then sold themselves into slavery to him, in return for grain.

What can we learn from this, brothers and sisters?

That turning to the government instead of to God to be our provider in hard times only leads to slavery? Yes... That the only reason government wants to be our provider is to also become our master?

Yes. But look how that passage ends, brothers and sisters! Thus Israel settled in the land of Egypt , in the land of Goshen . And they gained possessions in it, and were fruitful and multiplied greatly." God provided for His people, just as He always has! They didn't end up giving all their possessions to government, no, it says they gained possessions! But I also tell you a great truth today, and an ominous one.

We see the same thing happening today - the government today wants to "share the wealth" once again, to take it from us and redistribute it back to us. It wants to take control of healthcare, just as it has taken control of education, and ration it back to us, and when government rations it, then government decides who gets it, and how much, and what kind. And if we go along with it, and do it willingly, then we will wind up no differently than the people of Egypt did four thousand years ago - as slaves to the government, and as slaves to our leaders.

What Mr. Obama's government is doing now is no different from what Pharaoh's government did then, and it will end the same. And a lot of people like to call Mr.Obama a "Messiah," don't they? Is he a Messiah? A savior? Didn't the Egyptians say, after Pharaoh made them his slaves, "You have saved our lives; may it please my lord, we will be servants to Pharaoh"? Well, I tell you this - I know the Messiah; the Messiah is a friend of mine; and Mr. OBAMA IS NO MESSIAH! No, brothers and sisters, if Mr. Obama is a character from the Bible, then he is Pharaoh. Bow with me in prayer, if you will...

Lord, You alone are worthy to be served, and we rely on You, and You alone. We confess that the government is not our deliverer, and never rightly will be. We read in the eighth chapter of 1 Samuel, when Samuel warned the people of what a ruler would do, where it says "And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day..."

And Lord, we acknowledge that day has come. We cry out to you because of the ruler that we have chosen for ourselves as a nation. Lord, we pray for this nation. We pray for revival, and we pray for deliverance from those who would be our masters. Give us hearts to seek You and hands to serve You, and protect Your people from the atrocities of Pharaoh's government. In God We Trust...

Labels: Egypt, Religion

Labels: music

Labels: Entertainment

A fitting sermon for this Sunday.

God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait."

The God who created the universe in all its unimaginable vastness of suns and clashing galaxies does not need anything from you ... He's not looking for your help ... He's looking for your gratefulness and obedience ...

Hard to understand that "not need" --- but how could it be otherwise? Harder even to comprehend than the notion of an interventionist God; a God that has no needs but yet intervenes in the micro level of His Creation. A God who can from His creation and without need form ....say.... a Beethoven. Form such a soul that Beethoven can -- from somewhere inside himself --- create, in a shadowplay of creatio ex nihilo, a Moonlight Sonata. And then later, if 'later' carries any meaning at all to God, God forms another man -- centuries distant | perhaps intended ages before --previous, previous -- who can see and comprehend black marks on a lined sheet of bleached wood pulp and cause the music, varigated, to bloom on a salt flat half way around the angel-girdled globe; where above such sad and lowly plains they bend on hovering wing.

Labels: God

Labels: pictures

Warren Buffett’s reputation is bigger than his ability. How can this person outperform the market for so many years by simply buying stocks and bonds is the question most often asked? What makes him so much smarter than the average investor? It’s really very simple, he has billions of dollars of assets that people will go to extraordinary lengths to borrow ... and he’s a crony capitalist.

The first advantage is that he has lots of money. He uses the money to buy out closely held companies for pennies on the dollar when the family wants to cash out. You don’t, so you don’t get in on this deal. He uses more money to bail out troubled companies who give him special shares of preferred stock (see GS below) with a huge dividend plus an equity kicker. You don’t, so you don’t get to be called the “Sage of Podunk.”

He also designs government bailout plans and then buys stock in the companies he tells government to bail out. All the while he’s grinning his shit eating grin and telling us that with his billions in the bank he doesn’t pay himself a high income so that his secretary’s in a higher tax bracket. Here’s a question of Uncle Warren at the next board meeting: “Why do you bother to pay yourself any salary at all?”

From"Throw Them All Out."

In the wake of the $700 billion TARP bailout, Warren Buffett apparently shaped a plan to clean up toxic assets that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner later adopted–resulting in massive profits for Buffett.


According to Schweizer, after the bailout bill’s passage, Warren Buffett sat down and wrote then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson a four-page private letter laying out a plan to clean up the toxic assets plaguing numerous financial institutions. ...


After Paulson’s exit, incoming Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner tweaked the plan and rolled it out in March 2009. But according to quarterly reports from Buffett’s holdings company, Berkshire Hathaway, between the time the billionaire crafted his plan and Geithner adopted it, Buffett quietly purchased 12.4 million shares of Wells Fargo stock and 1.5 million shares of U.S. Bancorp. Once the government unveiled its “Public-Private Investment Program,” bank stocks jumped, resulting in large profits for Buffett.


How much Buffett profited is hard to calculate, since there’s no way to know what his purchase price was. But prior to the government adopting Buffett’s plan, Wells Fargo had been trading at roughly $20 a share. In the weeks after Geithner’s announcement, the stock jumped to $30 a share. Likewise, U.S. Bancorp went from $8 in February 2009 to more than $20 a share by May.


Schweizer’s revelations contradict the image Warren Buffett has worked hard to create as that of a folksy, grandfatherly figure who stays above the political fray and rarely gets mired in the muck of partisan politics. ..


For example, Schweizer examines Buffett’s intense private lobbying efforts and deftly-timed stock buys that leveraged TARP bailout monies to create up to $3.7 billion in windfall profits for Berkshire Hathaway.


In September of 2008, Buffett invested $5 billion in the over-leveraged investment house of Goldman Sachs, having obtained impressive terms: Berkshire Hathaway would receive preferred stock with a 10% dividend yield, and the option to buy another $5 billion at $115 a share.


As the political debates surrounding the proposed $700 billion TARP bailout bill heated up, Buffett maintained an appearance of naivete, an “aw shucks” shtick that deferred to the judgment of politicians. “I’m not brave enough to try to influence the Congress,” Buffett told the New York Times.


Behind closed doors, however, Buffett had become a shrewd political entrepreneur. With his Goldman bet in place, the billionaire exerted his considerable political influence in a private conference call with then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats. During the meeting, Buffett strongly urged Democratic members to pass the $700 billion TARP bill to avert what he warned would otherwise be “the biggest financial meltdown in American history.”


Buffett had a strong financial interest in the bailout’s passage, says Schweizer. “If the bailout went through, it would be a windfall for Goldman. If it failed, it would be disastrous for Berkshire Hathaway.”


Yet Buffett had little reason to worry; his insider political connections afforded him two guarantees. First, many members of Congress were themselves investing heavily in Berkshire Hathaway throughout the bailout talks–a move that may simply have been a good investment in an unsteady time, or else a shrewd exploitation of unique information. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), for example, snatched up $130,000 worth of Berkshire Hathaway stock. Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) also bought shares in Berkshire Hathaway, as did Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who purchased half a million dollars’ worth just days after the Wall Street bailout bill was signed. Second, Buffett knew he had an ally in the surging Barack Obama. Buffett had backed Obama in 2008. And as Obama has himself conceded, “Warren Buffett is one of those people that I listen to.”


When the TARP bailout passed, Berkshire Hathaway firms received a staggering $95 billion in bailout cash from U.S. taxpayers. In total, TARP-assisted companies made up almost a third (30%) of Buffett’s entire publicly disclosed stock portfolio. The payoff: by July 2009, Buffett’s Goldman bet and his congressional jawboning had yielded profits as high as $3.7 billion.


Incredibly, in a breathtaking public relations move, Buffett publicly complained that the government bailouts had put his company at a disadvantage, because funders “who are using imaginative methods (or lobbying skills) to come under the government’s umbrella–have money costs that are minimal.” Rolfe Winkler of Reuters best captured Buffet’s audacity: “It takes chutzpah to lobby for bailouts, make trades seeking to profit from them, and then complain that those doing so put you at a disadvantage.”

Labels: Buffett, crony capitalism

Frank J. Fleming summarizing the argument made by Stephen Chu, Nobel Prize Winner, Secretary of Energy in the Obama administration and the guy who lost $500 million of your money in Solyndra.  It will also be his reason for losing billions more.

Labels: energy, Obama, solar

The Iraq War Was Wrong Blog 

And that's a enough of a reason right there. For The Iraq War to be was wrong. Taht Saddam was secular (not religious). I mean he was hell of secular where do you even get off saying he wasn't. So then (connect the dots) The Iraq War was wrong. I mean do I have to lay it out for you.

Labels: humor, Iraq

Three beers later

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell today announced a special feature for this year's Superbowl halftime show. Prior to the appearance of emigrée demicentarian pop idol Madonna, Goodell himself will appear before the assembled throng — and offer the gathered fans a choice: whether to pardon...Denver quarterback Tim Tebow...or the thief Barrabas?

Labels: humor, sport

The Other McCain 

Probably not what he expected on his tombstone:


“Justin Street, 1989-2011: He Thought His Penis Was Too Small.”

A woman was arrested and charged with performing this procedure.

Labels: crime, humor

IMAO 

The president is celebrating Hanukkah.

Not “planning to observe Hanukkah beginning December 20th” but IS. As in now.

None of this silly waiting until the Festival of Lights actually begins, but now. Because, it’s not like days … or the number of days or anything … really matter, right?

And, so as to not drag it all out, the president went ahead and lit all the candles. Because, well, you know, why not. It’s not like you need to light one a day or anything, right? It doesn’t, like, have any special meaning, right?....

Labels: Jews, Obama

Protein Wisdom

I’m tempted to talk about the irony of kids taking out student loans to enroll in a class that will “study” why irate college grads who can’t get jobs are camped out in tents complaining about the amount they owe on student loans, but then I think ....

Labels: Academia, occupy wall street

Doug Ross 

The report, conducted by Milliman, Inc., projects the impacts of the federal health care reform law starting in 2014, when most of the law's provisions go into effect. The report shows significant changes that will increase premiums while expanding government programs.

Specifically, Milliman's report projects that individual premiums in Ohio could increase by as much as 55 to 85% in 2014, not including the current medical trend which has been an average increase of 7 to 8% nationwide each year. Moreover, some individuals may see their premiums increase by 90 to 130% depending on their current health status...

The change you voted for.

Labels: health care, Medical

Iowahawk

Hello Faddah
Hello Mama
I'm Occupying
Camp Obama
I'm protesting
Wall Street grabbings
And trying to avoid the hobo stabbings


On my iPhone
With my last tweet
I down-twinkled
Jews on Wall Street
Please don't worry
About psychosis
'Cause my Guy Fawkes mask repels tuberculosis

Labels: humor, Iowahawk

Ace of Spades

He's terrific, if you support an absolutist, doctrinaire policy of pacifism, which is in fact far more left-wing than Obama's, and may be more left-wing than Dennis Kucinich's.

People who support Ron Paul (and they are legion) turn a totally blind eye to the fact that he inhabits a world without people who want to kill us for existing.

Labels: election, Libertarian

Powerline on Holder

“I’m a big guy. I’ve been in Washington for a long time,” Holder said, seeking to create the impression that the controversy over Fast and Furious is sound and fury signifying politics as usual. It’s even possible he believes it.

Labels: crime, Guns, Holder

American Digest 

They'll tell you we are running out. They lie.

Labels: energy

Flight Level 390

Position: Over TOU (Tatoosh)
Altitude: 36,000 feeet
Groundspeed: 441 knots
Equipment: A319
Pax-on-Board: 123


Airborne...


As TOU passes beneath, I note the compass heading leaving U.S. airspace is 295 degrees. The ETP (equatime; half-way point) is still in front of us... PANC (Anchorage) ahead and over the dark horizon. Local time is 2215 hrs.


The center-tanks are almost empty as we go feet wet. Fi-Fi will run the center-pumps an extra five minutes after the last of the fuel is sucked out, just to make sure.

Life on the line.

Labels: Flying

PJ Media 

The French have growing reservations about the euro: 36% want to withdraw from the eurozone and go back to the franc, the old national currency; 4% have no opinion, which means that they don’t warmly support the single European currency; 44% say it is a handicap in the present context of a world economic crisis; 45% say it doesn’t serve the national interests of France; and a staggering 62% say it is damaging the average French family’s standards of living and purchasing power.

England's out. Can France be far behind?

Labels: Economy, Europe

Jihad Watch 

Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood said that the country's peace treaty with Israel needs re-evaluation by the country's new parliament, in press remarks by a senior member of the group published Friday.

This is not going to end well.

Labels: Egypt, Islamofascism, jihad

Belmont Club:  Corzine said he was “stunned” to learn shortly before the firm sought bankruptcy protection at the end of October that MF Global could not account for the money.

However a story from Reuters says the story is simple. Corzine transferred the clients assets to ... London where he could legally bet the money — a bet he lost — and now it’s gone. Poof. Voila!

Modern Democrats learned a lesson from Hillary Clinton who, knowing that being caught in a lie under oath is a crime, simply lied about her memory, which is infinitely harder to prove.

Labels: corruption, crime, Democrats

From Instapundit:

Is the availability of $500,000 forgivable loans a sign of a bubble? Possibly.

He's got a million of them.

Labels: Academia, Economy

From Patterico's Pontifications.  It seems that those MSM "fact checkers" can't tell the difference between a "fact" and an opinion.  It's not just PolitiFact, a place where the DNC sends its press releases. The Associated Press does the same thing.

Labels: biased reporting, media, The Press

Labels: Economy, Obama

James Taranto's "Best of the Web"

If They Want to Reproduce, They'd Better Get Some Clothes On

They breed in the dark ... which is not surprising.



They look somewhat like Henry Waxman

But some people say they are much cuter.

And they have their own blog. I'm not sure that Henry Waxman does.

The lonely life of scientists.  Naked mole rats make deformed, sluggish sperm 

Naked mole rat colonies contain just one sexually active male – and the lack of competition has left its sperm shrivelled and sluggish.

It turns out that the reason for all this is that the Mole Rat colony is dominated by a female.

Naked mole rats live in colonies dominated by the queen, who chooses one male at a time to mate with. She suppresses the reproductive instincts of every other male in the colony. Because the chosen male has exclusive mating rights, he can afford to produce sperm that will dawdle on their way to the egg.

All this fascinating information is brought to you by evolutionary biologists and published by BMC
and the articles are peer reviewed.   Just like all the global warming climate change research.

Just saying ...

Labels: humor

Daniel Henninger in Obama's Godfather Speech says:

The president sounds more like a Corleone than a Roosevelt....

There is that defining moment when Michael Corleone says to Fredo, his brother, "You're nothing to me now." When even as party leader, a president of the United States gives a major speech in which people get singled out repeatedly as basically enemies of "the middle class," one has to wonder if they are nothing to him.

To me he sounds more like the leaders of those "People's Republics" who describe their victims as "enemies of the state."

Labels: Obama

"We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything.” I don’t even know where to start with these people. ...

I’ll tell you some of the things that the 99% are getting. A comfortable suburban existence, a car, a digital camera, an internet connection, TV, enough food to make them fat, cigarettes, liquor, and enough free time to whine about all of this on the internet.

I mean, seriously guys, that’s a pretty remarkable definition of nothing.

Labels: occupy wall street

Good advice.

Labels: homosexuality

Did you see that pig fly?

Documents obtained by CBS News show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) discussed using their covert operation "Fast and Furious" to argue for controversial new rules about gun sales.

This is CBS news you people!

I blame Bush ... or global warming.

Labels: Constitution, crime, Guns, Holder, Obama, The Press, Weapons

Darius Long, whose son, Army Pvt. William Andrew Long, was shot and killed at an Arkansas military recruitment center in 2009 testified before congress:

"My faith in government is diminished. It invents euphemisms ... Little Rock is a drive by and Fort Hood is just workplace violence. The truth is denied,"

This is Obama's Army. 

Labels: Military, Obama, Political correctness

What should be clear to the Brotherhood, which, on Thursday, denied any plans to form an alliance with the Salafis, is that most Egyptians have no interest in swapping Mubarak’s secular dictatorship for a religious one.

Let’s figure out what the voting in Egypt means in concrete terms. What we have so far are these results for one-third — the most liberal one-third! — of Egypt:

Muslim Brotherhood — 37 percent

Al-Nour (Salafist) — 25 percent

Egyptian bloc (mainly the Free Egyptians Party) — 14 percent

Wafd (liberal, but willing to work with Brotherhood) — 8 percent

Al-Wast (moderate Muslim party) — 4 percent

Basically, nationalism has collapsed completely. Liberalism is weak. Moderate Muslims are few. Radical Islamism is the only game in town. Remember that: no alternative exists to an extremist, repressive, anti-Western, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian ideology.

Thank you, President Obama and the New York Times!

Second: the third largest party is the Egyptian bloc, which consists mainly of the Free Egyptians Party along with smaller leftist and liberal parties. Much of its vote comes from Christians, meaning that the proportion of Egyptian Muslims who voted for Islamist parties is even higher than it appears, perhaps 80 percent by the end of the elections.

Where, you might ask, is the vaunted Facebook kids’ Justice Party? Or the supposed leader of the reformists, touted by the U.S. government as Egypt’s future leader, Muhammad ElBaradei?

Answer: Nowhere.

...these votes reflect the most liberal part of Egypt! The Islamists generally, and al-Nour proportionately, will do even better in Upper Egypt (the south).

Labels: Egypt, Islamofascism, Liberalism, media, TimesLies

H/T Vanderleun

Labels: God, music

Labels: Osama

Richard Fernandez: 

Nassim Taleb, writing in Foreign Affairs, describes why a Black Swan came to Cairo without anybody noticing and in general why opinion leaders keep getting caught on the wrong foot by the arrival of “large-scale events that lie far from the statistical norm and were largely unpredictable to a given set of observers.” The fall of the Berlin Wall was a surprise. The 2008 meltdown was a surprise. The Arab Spring was a surprise. “Why is surprise the permanent condition of the U.S. political and economic elite?”

The answer, he argues, is that the elites won’t see them coming rather than that they can’t. Part of the problem is the consequence of their own damping. By attempting to centrally manage systems according to some predetermined scheme they actually store up volatility rather than dispersing it. By kicking the can down the road they eventually condemn themselves to bumping into a giant pile of cans when they run out of road.

It's like increasing the pressure in a boiler more and more. When it lets go, that energy is released all at once and the results are catastrophic.

Many of the politicians now in Washington are old - Barney Frank is 71 - and think that they will be safely retired when the US runs into that big pile of cans at the end of the road.

Labels: Economy, Politics

The end of capitalism? "Maybe we need some time when we're walking around with a donkey with pots hanging on to the sides."

Labels: humor, occupy wall street

Tina Trent tells us what the future will be like if the OWSers ever take over.

Next, two unlikable, anorectic-looking people wearing urban motley and ominously bearing a flipboard and magic markers (not magic like the apple, just regular magic) made everyone gather in an ampitheatre-ish shape. The meeting was supposed to be non-hierarchical but ended up being much more hierarchical than any real meeting because we were all forced to endure a long and repetitive lecture from Thing One and Thing Two about how they weren’t acting as “leaders” but as “leaderless facilitators” before proceeding to run the meeting with their iron (actually, hennaed and grubby) fists.

That, my friends, is the pure essence of thought-control: being forced to participate in the illusion that someone isn’t doing precisely what they are doing to you as they keep doing it while demanding that you repeatedly agree that they are not.

And this is what the future will really look like, if, by some colossal societal fail, the Occupiers ever get their way. The future will look like a giant human resources meeting where the usual petty cubicle fascists control the whiteboard and waste your time while telling you they are doing so for your self-improvement.

Sort of like real human resource meetings. Only, at these future Occupy human resources meetings, nobody will be allowed to zone out into the deep inviting pool of their Starbucks, contemplating the work piling up on their desks, or that hot guy in accounting whose mid-morning shadow makes your spine-crushing control-top pantyhose entirely worth the pain — there will be none of that, because boredom and whimsy are just two of humorless collectivism’s many enemies.

Instead, at dystopian future Occupy human resources meetings, everyone will be forced to participate continuously in the expression of their views, so long, that is, as their expressions are the same expressions expressed by the whiteboard-wielding, iron-fisted, anti-hierarchical movement non-leaders.

Also, after the Occupy human resources meetings, nobody will be getting back to work because there will be no more jobs, only more human resource meetings.

Have you ever been in a meeting where your assent was demanded from someone who claimed that you were free to dissent?

Labels: occupy wall street

And you thought that single motherhood had no consequences? 

What were we expecting the scourge of single motherhood and debased family structures to look like? How were we expecting it to play out?

There was never any thought given to the consequnces of changing one of the foundation stones of society.

It is my hypothesis that a measurable part of the anger emanating out of OWS (the Leftist element of it) is the result of single motherhood and the dismantled family.

There still isn't.

Labels: Liberalism, occupy wall street, sexual politics

Labels: Clinton, debt, Gingrich, The Press

Was this predictable?  Absolutely!  In fact I wrote an essay Hope vs. experience (a play on the joke about second marriages) back in February of this year that said

The problem with the optimism that many are expressing for the revolutions in the Middle East is that, while there are many examples of happy marriages, there are no examples of democratic Islamist regimes. The Middle East was substantially converted to Islam following the dictates and example of Muhammad who'se rule and religion was spread by the sword. This situation has not changed substantially since Mohammad’s death in 632. Before Mohammad the region was ruled by Romans, king and Pharaohs; after him it was ruled by Caliphs. There is no - zero - example of Democracy in the Middle East with the exception of Israel and a very shaky state – Iraq – which was created, nurtured and shaped by the American military following the invasion under George Bush. To repeat, there is no history or political culture of representative government in the Middle East.

The next administration is going to have A LOT of cleanup to do.

Labels: Egypt, Islamofascism